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No frills Mobo w/ IGP for 24/7 box

M

MeSh1

Member
First ill explain what i use the system for. I store a bunch of divx/xvid files which i like to stream with my xbox360. I remote into it while at work and queue up some very light a/v transcoding. I also use it for Torrenting, occasionally FTP to it when i need to fetch a file and while at work, i use it to create a shunnel so i can access any website from work. My current setup is in need of an upgrade.

My current setup:
p4 Northwood 3.2
asus p4c800 mobo
1GB corsair memory 2x512
Promise IDE raid controller (hardware raid)
4x500gb seagate drives
1 74gb raptor (o/s)
at x1600 video (overkill i know)

I have an E2180 paired with a Tuniq Tower 120 that id like to use for my 24/7 box, but im not sure which mobo to purchase. Im considering this asus matx board Asus . It has gigabit lan and onboard video which is what im looking for more or less and its not expensive.

The questions:
Does anyone have any experience with the board im considering? Do you guys think I should go atx as oppose to matx? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks to all in advance for your guidance. Peace.


Edit: Theres a new mobo in the running. This guy. The ECS 945GCT-M. Seems solid. No thoughts from anyone huh.
 
No one has any suggestions or experiences? Can someone maybe post whats inside there 24/7 system? Im just trying to get some ideas.
 
My 24/7 system: Gigabyte DS3L, Xeon 3210 @ 3 ghz, 2G G.Skill PC6400 ram, Antec EA500, 7600GT. Fairly beefy UPS. Usage is very similar to yours, plus MythTV driving 1 HD and 2 SD tv tuners. And hosting of VMs containing old machines I had around the house and have since decommissioned.

I could be full of crap, but in my experience boards with integrated graphics seem to be meant for desktops which are on only a few hours a day or well engineered low performance OEM systems. Typically the chipset and PWM cooling is lousy, voltage regulation is lacking (they're targeted at extreme value buyers w/ low end CPUs) and in general... Yuck.

I prefer atx to micro atx simply for the added PCI or other slots. I always find some peripheral for my server (tv tuners, firewire, etc) that I want to stick in sooner or later.
 
Originally posted by: v8envy
My 24/7 system: Gigabyte DS3L, Xeon 3210 @ 3 ghz, 2G G.Skill PC6400 ram, Antec EA500, 7600GT. Fairly beefy UPS. Usage is very similar to yours, plus MythTV driving 1 HD and 2 SD tv tuners. And hosting of VMs containing old machines I had around the house and have since decommissioned.

I could be full of crap, but in my experience boards with integrated graphics seem to be meant for desktops which are on only a few hours a day or well engineered low performance OEM systems. Typically the chipset and PWM cooling is lousy, voltage regulation is lacking (they're targeted at extreme value buyers w/ low end CPUs) and in general... Yuck.

I prefer atx to micro atx simply for the added PCI or other slots. I always find some peripheral for my server (tv tuners, firewire, etc) that I want to stick in sooner or later.
Click to expand...



Thaks for the reply. I actually have a ds3l mobo that im trying to RMA at the moment (bad support). I even have G.Skill memory 🙂. Do you know how much power you're drawing? Ive gone through several scenarios in my head. Ive actually considered putting my 1950 pro vid card in along with my ds3l and making it my htpc / storage / everything else box. Maybe ill do that when my RMA starts rolling (hopefully soon).

DS3L related question for ya v8envy. Do you have any issues with your mobo holding the OC settings? Thats the reason im trying ot RMA it. Again thank you. Peace

 
Absolutely no issues remembering OC settings on either one of my DS3L boxes. However, I think I had to run the asstastic windows utility shipped with the board for it to write the OCd settings somewhere in the virtual BIOS. It did revert the settings on a cold boot once or twice otherwise. I rarely reboot (my only opportunity to do so was a few weeks ago when wife was out of town), and cold boots only happened during initial setup and testing.

On my OCd desktop S3 sleep mode works flawlessly. I try to reboot it about once a week, seeing as it's got Windows but other than that I just put it to sleep when I'm not at the keyboard.

Also no idea how much I'm drawing from the wall -- but going by the amount of heat that box is generating it's quite a bit less than the previous venice 3200+ with a non-80+ PSU. I do have EIST and speedstep on, though.

You could also get an ancient PCI video card and call it a day. I've got a box of them, shouldn't be hard to score a free one.
 
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